Twitter Fire Storm

Watching Colorado Unite on Social Media During the #BoulderFire

The continuously blurring lines between traditional and social media has never been more apparent to me than this past Monday (Labor Day) around noon MT. I was killing time at home between errands and decided to check my Twitter feed. Countless tweets tagged with #BoulderFire caught my eye and it became clear that a dangerous and destructive wildfire had broken out in the foothills.

The “traditional” side of me quickly turned on the television and I began furiously flipping through the local stations to find out more details. What did I find? Nothing. I couldn’t find a single station that had broken through the horrendous Monday afternoon television choices to report live from Boulder. So, the social media geek in me settled in on the couch, iPhone in hand, and read what seemed like hundreds of #BoulderFire tweets.

Information poured across my HootSuite dashboard faster than I could refresh the stream—evacuation details, TwitPic and YFrog images of the smoke and flames, animal rescue instructions, and Mile High Red Cross shelter announcements for evacuees. A few local Denver TV stations did seem to take notice of the social media groundswell regarding the fire and began retweeting first-hand accounts and important instructions. However, virtually witnessing the local and regional support from every day citizens was a powerful and exciting experience for me personally. Twitter was uniting Boulder and surrounding counties in real-time to come to the aid of those impacted.

Since Monday I’ve been monitoring the fires almost exclusively on Twitter. Some of my favorite updates include:

@alicia4181: I only know of the boulder fire because of twitter

@5280PRGal: Why do hurricanes get huge media coverage, yet I haven't seen much mention of the #boulderfire on @cnn @foxnews

@HumaneBoulder: For help w/pets 2nite call Dispatch 303-441-3333 Pets will be housed either here or transported by officer to @LongmontHumane #boulderfire

@jasper9: Is there a list of businesses offering assistance for #boulderfire anywhere? if not, lets get a public google doc going

@MelindaJordan: RT @lostremote: Twitter is playing a key role in #boulderfire, from evacuation alerts to independent reporting. http://bit.ly/9Xo9KG

@laurasrecipes: Just feeling so proud of this community...in awe of generosity, high tech information flow and amazing joining together...#BoulderFire

My prayers go out to everyone affected by this fire and I urge our local social media community to continue this virtual newsgathering and support system long after the TV trucks move to the next big story. If you know of any ways that @GroundFloorPR can help, please let us know. We would also appreciate your help in spreading the word about a fantastic effort by the Colorado Fall Home Show (@cogardenshowinc) to help with fire relief efforts. The Colorado Fall Home Show (presented by Colorado Garden Show Inc.), running this weekend (Sept. 10 – 12) at the Colorado Convention Center, announced it will donate $2.00 of every ticket sale to the Colorado Red Cross to help with relief efforts for the wildfire near Boulder. Thanks for your help!

~Alexis Anzalone (aka @aanzalone)

Proper Interview Etiquette

Tips for Acing Competitive or Informational Interviews

The day I graduated from college, I took off with a backpack full of clothes, a pair of old running shoes, and a Let’s Go Guidebook and headed toward the Southwestern Pacific Ocean to New Zealand. I immediately fell in love with the South Island and decided that I would channel my past four years of higher education into a job working as a jet boat assistant in Queenstown. Needless to say, I called home to tell my parents of my grand plans and found out that their intentions for me appeared to be quite a bit different. So, after six weeks of wandering somewhat aimlessly, I was nicely reminded to get my rear end back on a plane. My time had come to get a real job and so I headed off to Washington, DC and started sending out resume after resume. Looking back I wish someone would have sat me down and politely explained the unspoken rules of interviewing.

I now have the opportunity to meet with plenty of young job seekers for informational interviews and have gathered some entertaining stories through the years. I have compiled a few tips to consider when you are interviewing for a position or simply meeting someone for an informational appointment.

DON’T

1. Wear sunglasses during the interview (on your head or on your face).
2. Take a call on your cell phone.
3. Talk about how intoxicated you were during the weekend.
4. Snap your gum or slurp on your coffee.
5. Wear crazy jewelry, green nail polish, an unruly hairstyle, or noticeable eyebrow piercings.
6. Forget to ask questions. But avoid questions whose answers can easily be found on the company website.
7. Ask questions about salary and benefits unless you receive a job offer. It is presumptuous and annoys the person across from you.
8. Challenge the interviewer to a competitive match (I once had someone show up with a little Ms. Pac Man game and challenged me to play with him because he had read that it was my favorite pastime).
9. Give overly rehearsed and prepared answers. You come across sounding scripted and unauthentic.
10. Ask to borrow cab fare.

DO

1. Research the company you are meeting. Understand their competitors and their clients.
2. Practice interview questions with a friend or relative, or practice answering questions alone in the car. Folks may think you look strange, but it is well worth the extra effort.
3. Be aware of your body language. Don’t slouch. Maintain eye contact.
4. Be on time for your interview (or even a little early).
5. Avoid nervous habits such as tapping your fingers, pulling on your hair or playing with a pen.
6. Keep the interview positive. Please do not make negative remarks about any previous jobs, employers or colleagues.
7. Use proper English—avoid slang or jargon.
8. Treat the receptionist the same as you would the CEO.
9. Follow up with a handwritten thank you note. This is not only proper etiquette and a common display of appreciation, but it also allows you to reaffirm one or two key points you talked about in the interview.
10. End quickly and courteously. Do not linger. Thank your interviewer for the meeting with a strong handshake and a smile.

This list could go on forever – there is literally an endless array of “dos” and “don’ts” for an interview – and not everyone agrees on every aspect of that list. However, some basic “interview etiquette” tips that are important to remember are listed here.

If you want more, don’t forget to check out Andrew Hudson’s job site. He is always full of great tips…

~Laura Love

Living a Balanced Life: Let’s Go Back to Kindergarten

It’s hard to believe summer is almost over and it is back to school time. During a teacher conference for my son to prepare him to head back to the classroom, I saw a poster Robert Fulghum’s “All I really need to know I learned in Kindergarten,” and thought it provided great wisdom for all ages and stages. It has been a long time since I read it and I wanted to share and reflect on its message. Everything you need to know to be successful at home and in business is in there somewhere. Here’s the text:

All I really need to know about how to live and what to do and how to be I learned in kindergarten. Wisdom was not at the top of the graduate school mountain, but there in the sand pile at school.

These are the things I learned:
• Share everything.
• Play fair.
• Don't hit people.
• Put things back where you found them.
• Clean up your own mess.
• Don't take things that aren't yours.
• Say you're sorry when you hurt somebody.
• Wash your hands before you eat.
• Flush.
• Warm cookies and cold milk are good for you.
• Live a balanced life - learn some and think some and draw and paint and sing and dance and play and work every day some.
• Take a nap every afternoon.
• When you go out in the world, watch out for traffic, hold hands and stick together.
• Be aware of wonder. Remember the little seed in the styrofoam cup: the roots go down and the plant goes up and nobody really knows how or why, but we are all like that.
• Goldfish and hamsters and white mice and even the little seed in the Styrofoam cup - they all die. So do we.
• And then remember the Dick-and-Jane books and the first word you learned - the biggest word of all - LOOK.

Just think what a better workplace or home life we’d have if we took the time to learn something new every day, be creative for an hour in the afternoon, or open our minds and just wonder. Are you sharing successes with your colleagues? Are you taking the time to LOOK and more importantly LISTEN before you make decisions or give directions to your team?

Go ahead, read it again.

~ Amy Moynihan

The Black Swan

As a child, my father would often try to explain his job and teach me about how the stock market works. I would always get lost in his example of trading fictitious pencils and erasers, but the part about bull and bear markets – or upward and downward trends – made sense. Bulls were rambunctious and bears lumbered, plain enough.

So, I was surprised while reading The Wall Street Journal when I came across an entirely new term, “black swan,” to describe drastic market upheavals, such as the Sept. 11 attacks, Iraqi invasion of Kuwait and the 1987 stock market crash – wait, I thought that was “Black Monday” – OK, this is all becoming very confusing.

The article described that the term black swan hails from the historic belief that all swans are white – a claim that was obviously false when European explorers discovered black swans in Australia.

The gist: Anything is possible. In fact, big surprises are more common than people think.

This notion caused me to think about the current upheaval in media and communications, largely wrought by the rise of the Internet. Newsrooms are shrinking, user-generated content continues to dominate online channels, and now Facebook has launched Places as a new location tracking service, the likes of Gowalla and Foursquare, to find friends and share your location with the rest of the world. But that’s a whole other blog post!

Stock market investors have the benefit of hindsight in knowing that financial markets will ebb and flow, and also rebound from dramatic black swan-type events. But not since the printing press have we experienced such dramatic change in communications. What will become of this current upheaval in the way we distribute and share information?

I imagine that more is to come in mobile communications and that both traditional and new media content sources will need to be even savvier at delivering news and information to small-format devices. I also expect the ongoing convergence of home entertainment and computing technology – whether it’s broadcast-quality TV from our laptops or computing from our flat screens. This is one thing that “Back to the Future II” got right.

Regardless, it’s safe to say that media and communications are in for continued black swan moments and that we shouldn’t expect a return to the past with a bear market any time soon.

So as PR professionals, this constant change translates into a new way of doing business. We cannot rely exclusively on a toolkit of proven best practices. To stay ahead of our industry’s own black swan moment, we need to continue to evolve our skills and use new and emerging resources to the best of our ability to meet the needs of our clients.

As an example of this new paradigm, our client Qdoba Mexican Grill recently launched a new campaign to fight burrito boredom – check it out! The campaign combines word-of-mouth marketing with online surveys and social media to keep burritos top-of-mind – a good example of how our jobs are evolving to get you (and reporters) to think differently about new and existing products and services.

(Source: Kim, Jan J., The Wall Street Journal, "Preparing For The Next 'Black Swan'," Aug. 21-22, 2010.)

~ Kimmie Greene

The Safety Pin

My little brother got married in May. Ten minutes before he was set to walk down the aisle, his pants broke. Wide open. As you can imagine, it was a melee trying to find a solution so he could make it down the aisle, say his “I Dos” and find a longer-term option for the reception. We searched high and low for a seamstress that we could pull out of the pew for a quick mend, but apparently there wasn’t one on the guest list. In a last ditch effort; we opted for the thing that always holds things together when you are in a pinch – the safety pin.

It’s an amazing little invention, the safety pin. It’s not ostentatious, doesn’t command the limelight and always seems to appear just when you need it the most. In a nutshell - it fixes things.

I wish every company had a job description for a safety pin.

As I look at the team at GroundFloor Media, I am reminded how invaluable these character traits are in a person and a colleague. Who is the safety pin in your office? On your team? In your life? Take a moment and send that person thanks for always keeping it together and for fixing things when nothing else seems to work.

You might even give them a small safety pin as a token of thanks for who they are and what they do for you. They may not light up in the same way they would should you show up with a bouquet of sunflowers, but once you take the time to explain it, it may mean far more than you could ever imagine.

~ Laura Love

Do the Right Thing

In between what has seemed like nonstop client crises and dealing with some serious things in my personal life, I’ve been reminded frequently over the past several weeks that simply doing the right thing is highly underrated.

It sounds simple, right? Just do the right thing. But in the business world and even in our personal lives, it’s very easy to let selfishness, profits or that next big promotion, drive our actions rather than focusing on what is right. Some might argue that “right” and “wrong” have different meanings to different people, but I would say that’s just a way of complicating a very simple concept.

Does the “right thing” mean waiting for regulators in your industry to implement new standards, and then complying fully with the new regulations? Or is it taking a look at your business, proactively, and setting your own standards despite what your competitors are doing or how it might affect your bottom line?

If one of your employees is going through a tough stretch personally, is it enough to provide personal days, as outlined in your employee handbook, so he/she can sort things out? Or do you pull the employee aside and really ask him/her “what can I do for you and how can we help you get through this?”

Real life examples of this concept are outlined extremely well in a book that I started re-reading this week. Let My People Go Surfing: The Education of a Reluctant Businessman is the business biography of Yvon Chouinard, founder and owner of Patagonia. It’s a compelling story of how the outdoor clothing/gear business was built, almost by accident, and how the closest thing he had to a business plan for decades was this: Patagonia and its employees have the means and the will to prove to the rest of the business world that doing the right thing makes for good and profitable business. It’s a great read for business owners, managers or anyone who might need a little perspective on how doing the right thing doesn’t have to be difficult.

Call it karma, the Golden Rule or simply doing good… whatever it is, we could all benefit from taking a step back a little more frequently and asking ourselves “what is the right thing to do?”

- Jim

Revisiting PR101 -- Messaging

I have been involved in a lot of messaging projects lately. Be it drafting key messages to help a client with issues management or building general messaging for a client from the ground up, it’s been a primary focus for many of my clients over the past few months. Which got me thinking about messaging – and why it matters in the first place.

We know we need messaging – it’s a basic tenet of PR. But does it really matter? Can’t we just wing it? Not advisable. Winging it can lead us down all sorts of tricky rabbit holes. So, here is a friendly reminder of some of the reasons that having solid messaging in place is of the utmost importance.

Key messages…
• Allow you to concisely articulate your company’s benefits
• Keep you focused
• Provide consistent positioning throughout all communications efforts
• Help you tailor your comments to specific audiences during media interviews
• Help you define not only who you are, but who you aren’t
• Highlight differentiation without bashing the competition or giving them a voice
• Allow you to measure success of communications efforts

I actually think messaging may be one of my favorite PR projects. To help a client nail down its story in a clear and concise way is a fun challenge. Sometimes it’s daunting at the outset, but once you conduct the interviews needed, cull through the loads of information gathered, and really hone in on those “nuggets” that define and differentiate your client, it’s very satisfying. And when you can take a crisis situation and distill it down to the key points you need to address, the crisis becomes less overwhelming and somehow more manageable.

Of course, messaging is never really finished – your company’s messages are always evolving and need regular updating and revisiting. At GroundFloor Media, we’re practicing what we preach and are revisiting our own key messages. In fact, we conducted a message development session for ourselves just last week. We all gathered in the conference room and went through the same steps that we take with clients – and came up with some great results.

That process is very reassuring because those key messages can come in handy. Two great case study examples from PRWeek include:
• Clear identification emerges as a focal point of messaging (Dec. 1, 2009)
• Consistent message helps P&G in diaper rash crisis (June 18, 2010)

When was the last time you took a look at your key messages? It may be time for a refresh. Or, if your answer is “never,” it’s definitely time to put that foundation in place.

~Amanda Brannum